It's a dangerous job. "You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him," he thinks. "But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws."

As she did in A Place of Greater Safety, Mantel humanizes history, tracing the daily decisions that turn bureaucrats into villains or heroes. In Greater Safety her focus was on the young lawyers — Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre — who would launch the French Revolution (and be destroyed by the Terror). Here, the revolution is a little more subtle: in order for a kingdom to be maintained, the world as it's known will be destroyed and remade, as much in Cromwell's image as the king's.

Love's lexicographer As the editorial director at Scholastic, David Levithan is surrounded by emotional stories about adolescents. Being overexposed to such hyperbolic feelings about feelings could easily turn a writer off pursuing such ventures himself — despite the secrets he may have picked up along the way.

Chris Adrian's tragic enchantments Chris Adrian's novels puff you full of delight, then rip your heart out. Adrian's a sadist, maybe. Or maybe he's got the biggest heart of any living writer, so big that it can hold the sweetest thoughts alongside shame and also death — real death, in all its devastation and splendor.